When Algorithms Replace Parties: AI Surveillance and Elite Power-Sharing in Autocracies

Advances in artificial intelligence and data analytics are transforming the tools available to authoritarian regimes, enabling governments to deploy AI-based surveillance technologies (such as facial recognition systems, Smart and Safe city projects, predictive policing, and automated social media monitoring) to track political activity in real time. While a growing literature examines how digital surveillance shapes repression and state–society relations, much less attention has been paid to its implications for intra-regime politics. This paper investigates how the adoption of AI-based surveillance systems affects authoritarian elites and political parties. I argue that these technologies expand rulers’ capacity to collect and process political information, thus increasing informational asymmetries between dictators and elites. As monitoring becomes more efficient and less reliant on institutional intermediaries, the bargaining power of the political elites declines, leading to a concentration of power in the hands of the dictator that is reflected by a decrease in the size of the ruling coalition and increased internal cohesion in ruling parties. Improved regime information also undermines opposition competitiveness, contributing to declining political representation. Taken together, these dynamics centralize political authority and shift the basis of legitimation toward the personal authority of the ruler. To test this argument, I use a country-year panel dataset covering 65 authoritarian regimes from the Global South and East between 2000 and 2023, combining measures of AI surveillance adoption with indicators of elite cohesion, party organization, and political legitimation. The findings show that AI surveillance adoption reduces elite bargaining power and coalition size while increasing party cohesion and personalistic legitimation, suggesting that AI-based technologies are reshaping the institutional foundations of contemporary authoritarian governance.